Interesting books, and news items about books and periodicals, particularly with respect to political and social issues. Since May, 2016, many of my larger book reviews have been put on a hosted Wordpress site; so now this blog emphasizes previews, interviews with authors, booklets, large periodical articles, and literary business issues. Note: no one pays me for these reviews; they are not "endorsements"!

Tuesday, March 19, 2019

On p, 44, Graeme Wood asks “Will John Bolton Bring on
Armageddon or Stave It Off?” Bolton
brought some fear when McMaster was ousted in March 2018, and became national
security adviser on April 9. Bolton was said to have a very hawkish reputation,
and wanted to tear up past agreements, as with Iran.

Trump had left the impression that he might do a “bloody
nose” attack on North Korea, but after the winter Olympics he rather suddenly
softened his position, leading to the summits in Singapore and recently Hanoi.

Bolton, in a recent interview on CNN, said that the “failed”
Hanoi talks may not that bad – he still thinks that Trump’s offering an eventually
more prosperous economy, at least for the Communist elite in North Korea, would
be in Kim Jong Un’s best interest and safest for the U.S.Trump, a few times in mid 2018, actually said
that his buttering up Kim was necessary to prevent possible (nuclear) war now.

Bolton (from Baltimore, a “blue” city) has been described as
OK on social issues, like supporting gay marriage.

On p. 64, David Frum (photo work by Oliver Munday and
Patrick White), asks “How Much Immigration Is Too Much?” (Online his subtitle is, “If liberals won’t
enforce borders, fascists will”.) Frum,
normally conservative, is quite objective on the various ways immigration
policy would affect various subgroups of Americans, and his arguments are quite
double-edged.

Generally, increasing legal immigration would help wealthier
Americans but could hurt some low-wage Americans.It’s quite true that lower-wage (and
sometimes undocumented) immigrants do the labor-intensive, manual jobs
Americans don’t want to do, including housekeeping and particularly caregiving.
Increase legal immigration will improve economic growth, even as native born
Americans have lower birth rates (which is sometimes an ideological weapon of
the alt-right).

Sunday, March 17, 2019

Indeed, I do have a tag “objectionable books” on this blog,
and this includes “manifestos” of a few notorious criminals.

OK, the author is apparently Brenton Tarrant, one of three
people charged in the Christchurch attack. I read the 74 page screed on
Document Cloud;it now gives a 403-forbidden.
(Elliot Rodger’s is still there and accessible.)

The manifesto also refers to a 1500-page screed by Norwegian
Anders Behring Breivik,

Given the notoriety, I won’t give the links and determined
users can probably find them. I
personally think that users need to know how people like this think, so it
should be available in archives. Students need to know what "great replacement" means, even if the idea is repulsive. Kaczynski’s has
long been online.

There are stories Sunday afternoon that the prime Minister
Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand had received an email with the manifesto about 10
minutes before the attack but had no idea where it would be.

The important point to note about this document is the way
it manipulates the reader into feeling that some fake points and false leads
need to be reacted to. The author wavers between ethnic nationalist fascism,
and outright communism.

A detailed analysisby Aja Romano on Vox explains the manifesto as
a “shitpost”.Ford Fischer (owner of News2Share)
had explained the concept in a Facebook post Friday morning.

But the term "shitposting" usually refers to placing spam-like posts in a forum to disrupt it. Back in 1998, the Libertarian Party of Minnesota used a listserver (a predecessor to today's social networks) that one person kept disrupting with rude comments derogatory of other people. There was also an Independent Gay Forum around 2000, managed from Washington DC by someone associated with GLIL (Gays and Lesbians for Individual Liberty) that experienced these kinds of problems. When applied to one booklet-length post or long essay, it would seem to imply to illogical flow of argument intended to distract the reader or intimidate the reader -- which would seem to fit with the idea of emailing it to authorities to taunt police before committing a crime. But it could also be just an "English 101" composition problem.

One of the most alarming aspects was his naming others (besides
Breivik) as “inspiring” him (starting with PewDiePie) although soon it is apparent
this becomes a “joke”.This could be
dangerous to an Internet personality without not enough popularity and clout. It also contributes to the (socially Marxist) notion that speakers are partially responsible when unstable people connect them with their crimes.

The shitpost idea also brings back a persistent problem that
was controversial on the internet ten years ago – spam blogs – their detection (sometimes with false
positives) got a lot of attention in the summer of 2008.

Generally, plants have the potential to be larger than
animals (like California redwood trees) and some fungi even larger still (like a fungus underground
in Michigan that has the DNA for the same organism for 37 miles). It has been
speculated that on other worlds, it may well happen that single-“paper sheet” organism
population species exist (like on Titan), with cells hundreds of miles apart (a
little like slime molds).

So it could be useful for a “multipartite” virus to split
into parts so it can produce separate infections in separate kinds of cells
feet apart.

Since many plants have cell walls, the idea that they can
spread more easily than in animals is hard to grasp.

These viruses are rare in animals, although they have been
found in some insects – moths and mosquitoes. Already you see where this can
head – arthropod transmission to higher animals, maybe mammals and people.Is it true that “there is always a first
time?”Quantum theory says, well, “yeth”.

A virus that could split into different viruses might be sexually
transmitted sometimes, and airborne other times – imagine the apocalyptic
nightmare from the 1980s had this been possible with a certain retrovirus.It didn’t happen. Or it might produce varied
kinds of diseases, where eliminating one kind with a drug or even environmental
change (as in my novel) allows another to flourish, and we don’t know about it. In fact, Truman Bradley's "Science Fiction Theater" back in the 1950s predicted that a virus could change a human into a plant.

Multipartite viruses have a very specific meaning in the
world of computer malware.

Martin Goldberg (“Economic Invincibility”) recently said in
a video that he was working on a sci-fi novel and the idea would be shocking.Is this his idea?It’s already in my “Angel’s Brother”. Maybe he has something credible that is even
more shocking.Bird flu is already
trite.

Monday, March 11, 2019

The early Spring (March-April, 2019) issue of “Foreign Affairs”
has a major piece on tribalism by Nicholas Sapolsky, “Your Brain on
Nationalism: The Biology of Us and Them”.

The picture shows a chimpanzee at the Singapore Zoo.Indeed, chimpanzees (not bonobos) are fiercely
tribal and their social organizations are geared for conflict with rival
groups.

His article stresses that humans, with even larger brains,
are able to belong to more that one group at the same time. Besides setting the
stage for intersectionality, it creates new opportunities and challenges for
cooperation.

Tribalism is relative.There’s a video of a cat encountering an octopus on a pier. My own
inclination was to “bond” mentally with the cat, who is more like me than an
invertebrate octopus (whose intelligence is actually comparable). Race, based
on the most superficial of characteristics that first develop when populations
are isolated from one another, still generate tribal feelings of us and them.Many people, myself included, could not
imagine sexual desire for someone of a different race.

But nationalism is more than just ordinary tribalism, it is aggregate tribalism, that set up the modern state system.

Friday, March 08, 2019

Highly recommended from the supermarket is the Time booklet “The
Science of Memory: The Story of our Lives”.The subtitle is “Build a Sharper Mind; Erase Bad Memories; What Animals
Recall”. The editor is Edward Feisenthal, for 96 pages. There are four chapters with many sections.

On p. 22, there is a short piece “An Elephant Never Forgets”
(Courtney Mifsud), which explains why for a pachyderm, the elephant has
intelligence and self-identity approaching man.It’s comparable to cetaceans and apes.There are other facts: chimpanzees remember some details better than
humans.
When I lived in Dallas in a
garden apartment in 1979, I was adopted by a tomcat (“Timmy”), who recognized
the sound of my car and ran to my apartment door when he heard it.He would disappear for a few days and then
return, to look after me, bringing trophy birds. He had a rich vocabulary of
sounds and at night could come into the bedroom and communicate he needed to go
outside for the bathroom.

On p. 67, Joshua Foer describes “The Battle of the Big
Brains”, and memory contests. But consider how world chess champion Magnus
Carlsen can play multiple simultaneous chess games while blindfolded, even winning
complicated endgames. He tells journalists that he is always pondering some
theoretical position in his mind all the time.

On p. 42 Su Meck and Daniel de Vise present “A Life Lost to
Amnesia”.In 1988 a ceiling fan fell on
Meck, costing her all previous memories. She had both retrograde and anteretrograde
amnesia. They recovered only very slowly.

Patrick Rogers, on p. 37, looks at why we forget most of our
early childhood memories, even though as toddlers we have them.My earliest memory may be of my father
opening an electric train set when I was 3 on Christmas morning in 1946. I have
some kindergarten memories at age 5 (the red chair), but in grade school there
is more continuity as I become a person.To a child or teen, school seems indefinite and time passes slowly,
because that’s what he or she knows. School and home is the universe. An older
person makes up for lack of quickness and immediacy of short term memory with a
rich database of a lifetime of experience, as if one could watch a video of a
typical day of any period in one’s life. In the space-time sense, they seem
equidistant.

Even during a lucid dream (especially if of a desired
intimacy, or of a problematic escape situation) one feels like the same person
with the same identity. Then memories of many dreams disappear suddenly unless
written down, erased from experience. But some remain for life.

The adult brain is fully formed by age 25.But how do you explain prodigies?Jack Andraka not only invented a major
medical test at age 15 for science fair; he keeps up with school work even as
an undergraduate at Stanford while globetrotting.Taylor Wilson demonstrating knowledge of
physics and engineering to build a fusion reactor (effectively a sun) in his
garage at age 14. David Hogg was dyslexic until puberty, when he suddenly
blossomed into a teen able (getting started at 17) to lead a revolution against
the gun lobby and outwit lobbyists and conservative media personalities,
putting some on the ropes.

Sunday, March 03, 2019

Today, the First Baptist Church of the City of Washington DC
was selling copies of Joseph Dalton’s non-fiction biography “Washington’s
Golden Age: Hope Ridings Miller, the Society Beat, and the Rise of Women
Journalists”.Dalton is her first cousin
twice removed.

Miller was a member of First Baptist Church for years, dying
of congestive heart failure in 2005.

Hope became the Washington Post’s society editor in 1937, so
she covered society life during the New Deal and then World War II. Her career at the Post continued through the
Lyndon Johnson administration, past the time of Kennedy. She was the only woman on the Post City desk
and edited the Diplomat Magazine.

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Since the 1990s I have been very involved with fighting the military "don't ask don't tell" policy for gays in the military, and with First Amendment issues. Best contact is 571-334-6107 (legitimate calls; messages can be left; if not picked up retry; I don't answer when driving) Three other url's: doaskdotell.com, billboushka.com johnwboushka.com Links to my URLs are provided for legitimate content and user navigation purposes only.
My legal name is "John William Boushka" or "John W. Boushka"; my parents gave me the nickname of "Bill" based on my middle name, and this is how I am generally greeted. This is also the name for my book authorship. On the Web, you can find me as both "Bill Boushka" and "John W. Boushka"; this has been the case since the late 1990s. Sometimes I can be located as "John Boushka" without the "W." That's the identity my parents dealt me in 1943!

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